Trimming the Rogue-Like Genre
I recently saw that some industrious person ported NetHack over to the DS, in the form of homebrew. It was to my great disappointment that I discovered all of the text in the game to be practically illegible. I was sincerely looking forward to toting around my own pocket sized rogue-like but, hopes destroyed, I was forced to go sulk.
My sulking didn't last long, though. A minute hadn't passed since my disappointment before I shared my troubles with
philjones who suggested that I make my own rogue-like for the DS.
And so I decided to do just that. I must mention at this point that this will probably never be a complete game. I look upon this project mostly as a programming exercise, although I aim to have some sort of fun result.
Yesterday I set about to relearn what I knew about writing code for the DS and actually getting that code to run. Not wanting to muck about anything more than I would should I write the game for PC using curses, I turned to the very handy PAlib to do the job of rendering the text. While I did very little programming yesterday, I feel good that I am now in a position to simply write code and worry very little about the underlying architecture.
I suppose I should pause for a minute and briefly explain what a rogue-like actually is. Rogue-likes - so called because they are based on the game Rogue - are turn-based RPGs perhaps best known for their use of ASCII characters to represent graphics. The - usually fantasy themed - gameplay generally involves descending further and further into a randomly generated dungeon, fighting off monsters and the like along the way, until, having journeyed down many, many levels, you complete some arbitrary task. Another very common feature of rogue-likes is the inclusion of perma-death - meaning once you die, there's no coming back - which is an interesting feature that adds a certain tension to the game. The games involve a great deal of strategy and are generally terribly difficult.
I can't say I'm interesting in writing another Rogue/NetHack clone. I fact, there is a great deal I dislike about your typical rogue-likes. People who enjoy the ASCII graphics usually say something along the lines of "My imagination is better than any graphics that a game developer can make." While I generally like rogue-y ASCII graphics, I'm not sure I feel quite that strongly about them. I'm mostly using them because I don't want to do what it takes to get graphics (ie. suck a lot of cock). There's nothing wrong with ASCII graphics, but I wouldn't actually call them a feature. I think that if you were to dangle an ASCII fan out a window long enough, they'd tell you that really, they play rogue-likes for the gameplay. Unfortunately, along with their ultra realistic imagination graphics, I feel that rogue-likes suffer from trying to be just a little too realistic in the gameplay department.
There are plenty of good features to a rogue-like, of course. The ones that interest me: Randomly generated levels, lots of things to own/do/see, and many ways to play the game. As a whole, I'm interested in the features that make rogue-likes a different experience every time you play.
On the other hand, the realism in rogue-likes goes beyond realism and ends up being more of a random-person-with-amnesia-wakes-up-in-a-weird-ass-dungeon simulator*. This is because you can barely tell what anything is or what it does, since the characteristics of things are changed from game to game, and because you spend a great deal of your time being killed for either no real reason (falling on spikes when the floor randomly gives away) or because you aren't at all prepared to deal with whatever is going on (being poisoned when you have had no chance to pick up an antidote, let alone identify it). Add to this the generally horrible control schemes which tend to map out minor commands to keys based on mnemonics rather than just using a menu system, and you have yourself a very frustrating experience.
What I plan to do is take out the amnesia syndrome. By placing the time setting in the present there's no more need to crawl through some weird dungeon thing. I plan to have randomly generated above-ground cities/towns/forests/whatever with multi-leveled buildings and houses that can all be explored. Sure, maybe I'll throw in some caves, but it won't be the main place of gameplay. Also, item recognition will no longer be based on either having a character that's good at recognizing things or by using a spell. I'm sure any reasonably intelligent adult can figure out what something is after a few moments of inspection. That's a shitty knife that's about to break; that's a sharp sword; that's a gun; that's a big gun; that's a bottle of milk. These are all things we can recognize. No more mentally handicapped characters, if you please. No more stupid deaths either. I'm not sure if I'll implement perma-death (maybe there will be an option) but if you want to restart the game it's because the change in gameplay appeals to you (or possibly because you were solidly owned), not because you were forced into it by some random occurrence, that you could do nothing to prevent. Lastly, the control scheme will involve minimal different buttons - mostly by virtue of the DS hardware - which will make it much easier to pick up and play.
I can only hope that the result is a worthy game that can still be considered a rogue-like. After all, the essentials are there - a random experience, lots of things to kill, lots of things to do - I'm only trying to trim out the bits that distract (me, at least) from the gameplay. Now, I just have to program the thing...
*With all of those hyphens, it's impossible to tell if it's supposed to be a weird-ass dungeon or a weird ass-dungeon. What did I really mean? You'll never know!
My sulking didn't last long, though. A minute hadn't passed since my disappointment before I shared my troubles with
philjones who suggested that I make my own rogue-like for the DS.
And so I decided to do just that. I must mention at this point that this will probably never be a complete game. I look upon this project mostly as a programming exercise, although I aim to have some sort of fun result.
Yesterday I set about to relearn what I knew about writing code for the DS and actually getting that code to run. Not wanting to muck about anything more than I would should I write the game for PC using curses, I turned to the very handy PAlib to do the job of rendering the text. While I did very little programming yesterday, I feel good that I am now in a position to simply write code and worry very little about the underlying architecture.
I suppose I should pause for a minute and briefly explain what a rogue-like actually is. Rogue-likes - so called because they are based on the game Rogue - are turn-based RPGs perhaps best known for their use of ASCII characters to represent graphics. The - usually fantasy themed - gameplay generally involves descending further and further into a randomly generated dungeon, fighting off monsters and the like along the way, until, having journeyed down many, many levels, you complete some arbitrary task. Another very common feature of rogue-likes is the inclusion of perma-death - meaning once you die, there's no coming back - which is an interesting feature that adds a certain tension to the game. The games involve a great deal of strategy and are generally terribly difficult.
I can't say I'm interesting in writing another Rogue/NetHack clone. I fact, there is a great deal I dislike about your typical rogue-likes. People who enjoy the ASCII graphics usually say something along the lines of "My imagination is better than any graphics that a game developer can make." While I generally like rogue-y ASCII graphics, I'm not sure I feel quite that strongly about them. I'm mostly using them because I don't want to do what it takes to get graphics (ie. suck a lot of cock). There's nothing wrong with ASCII graphics, but I wouldn't actually call them a feature. I think that if you were to dangle an ASCII fan out a window long enough, they'd tell you that really, they play rogue-likes for the gameplay. Unfortunately, along with their ultra realistic imagination graphics, I feel that rogue-likes suffer from trying to be just a little too realistic in the gameplay department.
There are plenty of good features to a rogue-like, of course. The ones that interest me: Randomly generated levels, lots of things to own/do/see, and many ways to play the game. As a whole, I'm interested in the features that make rogue-likes a different experience every time you play.
On the other hand, the realism in rogue-likes goes beyond realism and ends up being more of a random-person-with-amnesia-wakes-up-in-a-weird-ass-dungeon simulator*. This is because you can barely tell what anything is or what it does, since the characteristics of things are changed from game to game, and because you spend a great deal of your time being killed for either no real reason (falling on spikes when the floor randomly gives away) or because you aren't at all prepared to deal with whatever is going on (being poisoned when you have had no chance to pick up an antidote, let alone identify it). Add to this the generally horrible control schemes which tend to map out minor commands to keys based on mnemonics rather than just using a menu system, and you have yourself a very frustrating experience.
What I plan to do is take out the amnesia syndrome. By placing the time setting in the present there's no more need to crawl through some weird dungeon thing. I plan to have randomly generated above-ground cities/towns/forests/whatever with multi-leveled buildings and houses that can all be explored. Sure, maybe I'll throw in some caves, but it won't be the main place of gameplay. Also, item recognition will no longer be based on either having a character that's good at recognizing things or by using a spell. I'm sure any reasonably intelligent adult can figure out what something is after a few moments of inspection. That's a shitty knife that's about to break; that's a sharp sword; that's a gun; that's a big gun; that's a bottle of milk. These are all things we can recognize. No more mentally handicapped characters, if you please. No more stupid deaths either. I'm not sure if I'll implement perma-death (maybe there will be an option) but if you want to restart the game it's because the change in gameplay appeals to you (or possibly because you were solidly owned), not because you were forced into it by some random occurrence, that you could do nothing to prevent. Lastly, the control scheme will involve minimal different buttons - mostly by virtue of the DS hardware - which will make it much easier to pick up and play.
I can only hope that the result is a worthy game that can still be considered a rogue-like. After all, the essentials are there - a random experience, lots of things to kill, lots of things to do - I'm only trying to trim out the bits that distract (me, at least) from the gameplay. Now, I just have to program the thing...
*With all of those hyphens, it's impossible to tell if it's supposed to be a weird-ass dungeon or a weird ass-dungeon. What did I really mean? You'll never know!